


Indifference

by narsus



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Backstory, M/M, Military
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2011-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narsus/pseuds/narsus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His psychotherapist had been right for the most part.  She’d just missed the part where it was a pre-existing condition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indifference

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Sherlock belongs to the BBC, Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat, and obviously in the genesis of it all, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Not so long ago, his psychotherapist, who was a good one, who was simply unlucky enough to have him as a patient, told him to write down everything that happened to him. She’d told him that it would help him readjust to civilian life. In retrospect, John wonders why she hadn’t told him to write down what had happened to him before, in Afghanistan. It’s one of the first things he would have suggested. Write down what happened, all of it, every last horrific detail so that you can see it starkly on the page. The theory is that by channelling the emotion you feel about the event, into writing, that somehow it flows out of you. The harsh _feeling_ gutters out because you’ve just written down something so horrific that it always catches at the edge of your vision, because you never want to see it head on. John is a psychiatrist himself after all. He’s quite aware of the theory, even if he’d rather spend his time watching people chasing complimentary archetypes to complete their own fractured selves.

Of course she’d never asked him to recall all of it, not really. She talked about him taking the time to process what he’d been through, about his adjusting to normality again. In theory, because of course he knows the theory, she was deliberately avoiding a rehash of his experiences, because his file stated that he already had flashbacks enough. _Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder_ in large printed letters on typed reports and scrawled, in that familiar physician’s scribble, at the top of clinical notes. Heightened threat perception, a constant state of tension, distrust of external input that attempted to normalise the situation. In a word: paranoia. She’d had a paranoid former solider, former doctor, in front of her and it was entirely understandable that she hadn’t wanted to trigger any sort of episode.

She’d expected that time would do the real work, dulling his memory of events while he filled up his days with something else. As long as he didn’t simply dwell on the past, in forgetfulness lay the road to recovery. It was just that he’d needed something to genuinely focus on, which he had, eventually, found. She’d been right all along, just not in the details. She’d tried to infer too much, had picked out the tremors in his hand, the instability of his psychosomatic limp, his dumb insolence as a mask for his distrust. The tremors were the shock of ‘normality’ because he’d adjusted quickly out there, to the heat and the dirt and the abundance of arbitrary death. Home had become far too eerily silent in comparison, enough so that he didn’t know if he really wanted to call it home anymore. The tremors were the tension that came with the paranoia, the conviction that just round the corner, with barely a moment’s notice, _something_ would happen. The limp, in all its psychosomatic glory, was, in its own way, a mark of merit. It was a visible wound, an injury that stood for, that signified, all his other ones. His leg had been injured when he’d been shot of course, so it was easy to see how the mind conflated the two, and when his shoulder never quite healed like it had been before, it only followed that his leg should remain the same way.

The blank, affable mask, a version of dumb insolence an adult could employ, was the only part where she was mistaken. That hadn’t been the result of his injury or, specifically, in response to his deployment. That had been an older aberration in what was expected. Out in Afghanistan it had earned him the reputation of being a bit of a psychopath, as colloquial definitions went. The troops knew better than to request a psychiatric evaluation, if they were trying to see if they could get shipped home, because he’d been the one doing them, and everyone knew that Major Watson wasn’t quite ‘right’ himself. That reputation for border-line insanity had also been the reason that he’d never caught flack for his rumoured sexual orientation either. If you managed to piss the Major off there was no telling where you’d find yourself stationed next or what he’d put in your report. The talk had always been that he got along with the US marines best because they weren’t very bright, though whether that was the literal truth or because they thought him fairly harmless, no one bothered to qualify. His fellow officers had had little to complain of at any rate and his superiors just put his more unnerving habits out of mind.

It usually takes some time for that sense of jarring wrongness to seep through anyway, for the person he’s interacting with to realise that something really, _really_ isn’t quite right. It’s harder to notice a mask if it’s a smiling one, in a sea of naturally smiling faces. He’s patterned that look on the real thing after all, on the wide eyed smiles that exist without artifice in the ‘normal’ world. Stretch his lips wide, open his eyes further, tilt the head up and he looks sincerely interested in whatever it is that anyone has to say. Except, the expression is too fixed, _too_ normal, just that little bit too far wide of the uncanny valley for it to be real at all. It is noticeable but it takes attention. Like x-rays of hands with polydactyl, it takes a moment to realise that something is different to the expectation. In Afghanistan it had been a game, his wide smile, his wide eyes, that bright gaze that had glittered with malevolence. Eyes just a little too wide, closed lips painting a sickle of a smile across his face, and usually, for greater effect, a small tilt to the head as he looked up at whomever it was who was addressing him. He’d always preferred to be sitting down for that sort of encounter too, casually, so that it threw others off balance.

It’s only twice that it hasn’t worked, that pantomime smile, to put others off. Once was out in Afghanistan, across a table at the edge of the canvas covering that made up the Mess. The other officers had gone, save one, one of the quieter Americans. He’d offered John a cigarette, he’d smoked Lucky Strikes as if to complete the picture, and John had accepted, letting the other man light it for him, leaning together over the table. He’d looked up then, through the cigarette smoke, deliberately, through his lashes, but by then the other had turned away, was sitting sideways watching things being cleared up. Nothing ever came of it and he doesn’t even remember the man’s name or if they ever saw each other again but, for a brief moment, it had been there, an urge to do something just that little bit different with his facade of a face. The second time had been in the quiet of a government office. He’d sat while Mycroft had stood above him, even leaning back against the desk Mycroft had been definitively taller, and had smiled his false smile. He’d even batted his eyelashes for further amusement, knowing, expecting that a man like that would instinctively comprehend the subtle feeling of reality suddenly sliding wide of the mark. But Mycroft hadn’t reacted. In fact, he’d smiled in return and launched into an explanation of further details of the case. He hadn’t even had the excuse of failing to see John’s actions and yet, somehow, he’d still carried on as if everything were, in effect, normal.

A lack of reaction is to be expected in the game John plays with humanity of course, but usually it’s a deliberate reaction, a studious effort to ignore the twitch on the thread, the abnormality in the chain of what should happen. Usually, he sees it, the moment they recognise that something is wrong, and then the flicker of panic before they begin to play at pretend. They choose not to respond to his mask but they always acknowledge it in that split second of stillness, of silence. But Mycroft hadn’t reacted. There had been no sudden moment of stillness, of wariness in response to a mask worn like a face. Mycroft had responded, to John’s smile, to his wide, curious, gaze as if it was all entirely sincere. He’d even offered an equally synthetic smile of his own.

The theory is that John’s pantomime faces are a shield, a mask of his true feelings, because he’s still not quite acclimatised to whatever it is that is deemed ‘normal’ these days. The theory being that he is playing out emotions across his face, because he expects that he’s meant to feel them, not because he actually does. It’s a theory that doesn’t help anyone. It’s not as if it began in Afghanistan after all. He’s been like this for as long as he remembers, because he learnt, quickly enough, out of necessity, to hide his true expression. Perhaps, he supposes, Mycroft has learnt the same as well, to hide his real face and only present that’s expected to be seen. Perhaps then, there is a connection, in a sense of disconnection. They might touch, palm against palm, mouth against mouth and still feel the same, abiding, consuming silence that envelops them. The gunfire, the screams of the dying, the sound of metal and stone shattering were all a distinct counterpoint to that, they were demarcations in the silence, points of light in the vast absence of human feeling, but he can hardly tell anyone that.

People say that John is a good doctor. They probably say that Mycroft is a good civil servant too. They are both perfectly capable of fulfilling a function, especially when it’s one that lets them express indifference as part of a professional mien. It’s just that, while others struggled for professional aloofness on the battlefield, to John it came naturally. Because everything can simply be reduced to cost analysis, what does and doesn’t serve the purpose of keeping him warm, fed and sheltered. Everything, even now, can be evaluated against that cost-benefit scale; everything has a definitive place in the mechanism of preserving himself. Even Mycroft, not in a measure of material resources, but as a point of reference, as a reflection, a mirror held up so that he knows that there are more like him. It’s not the comfort of numbers he’s seeking, nor any sort of artificial society of silent, indifferent men. The fact of the matter is that, for once, here is something to genuinely amuse him. The very existence of just one other like him being proof enough, after all, that the world is a far crueller place than everyone likes to pretend.


End file.
